Ray Berry recently wrote a letter in his BushToons, where he spoke of seeing a documentary on the fifties called "Duck and Cover", about the Cold War and nuclear war scare. He went on to suggest that it had built into those of us who were kids then a sort of hard-wiring acceptance of a black-and- white view of the universe, where We are always the Good Guys, and They are always the Bad Guys.
The problem is, of course, that the real world doesn't work that way, that it's all shades of gray.
Now, I have viewed the last twenty-odd years as the GOP pushing this world-view as hard as it is able. There was serious trouble for them, by the time of the '92 elections, because The Evil Empire (tm) had fallen, and they had no real Bad Guys to be against. We saw the first shots fired, of what they tried through the nineties, when in the Bush- Dukakis debate, Bush Sr. "accused" Dukakis of being a "card-carrying liberal", as though he was accusing him of being a Communist.
Obviously, it worked to some degree, but not far enough for them, since they lost the '96 presidential elections, as well.
With the advent of 9/11, they finally had everything they wanted back again: an Evil Empire (militant Islamics), consisting of, and run by, people who didn't look like us (assuming that "us" referred to Caucasians), who wanted to destroy us. Better still, unlike the Soviets, who were also a legitimate nation-state which could be destroyed economically, this was more of a Vietname-style conflict, where the enemy could move, regroup, and attack again ("they won't stand up and fight like a man!"...didn't the British say that, in some little colonial conflict a couple hundred years ago?).
This is literally almost the scenario of Orwell's 1984, except that there is, at least for the moment, only one superpower fighting an eternal war.
Consider this phraseology, now: "fighting an eternal war against Evil". Ring a bell? Is this not exactly a return to the Crusades of the Middle Ages?
What were the Crusades? For one, their intended function was to reduce the intra-European fighting, and an attempt to get the little kingdoms to act as one big one, using the "Us vs. Them" strategy?
In addition, the Crusades were a real-world reflection of the theological fight of Christianity of good vs. evil, and the idea of bringing on the Millennium.
All of this suggests that Dubya meant what he said, in calling this "War Against Terrorism" a new "crusade".
Having traced this thread back to what may be its roots, let me consider two other threads that lead out of Ray's letter.
First, consider Marxism. I do not mean what the Soviet Union became, or China, but what Marx himself saw. It was social control over all of the means of production, and at some point, the state itself would "whither away", resulting in a civil, warless anarchic (rulerless) society.
Does this not sound familiar? Is it not, in fact, a vision of the Millennium, but created in the here-and-now, and not waiting for the Messiah to usher it in?
In this, I believe that many of the extreme fundamentalist Christians saw a dreadful threat, an unChristian Millennium. Further, being secular, it must be the literal empire of the Anti-Christ, and so to be fought tooth-and-nail.
The second thread that I wish to follow is the agenda of the ultra-rich, those few families who, regardless of the current value of the dollar, directly own 60%-80% of all the wealth of the nation.
If you read of the lives of the factory workers of the last half of the nineteenth, and the first third of the twentieth centuries, you will see a literal hell on earth. Consider the social viewpoint that allowed a movie like the original Metropolis to be a *popular* movie. Would it not have appealed only to the intelligentsia, if the factory scenes were were not too close to real life? Look at Chaplin's Modern Times, and you see the same thing.
Given that, the idea of social control, or ownership, is a thing most certainly to be feared, since it would result in the loss of the fortunes, and thus the power, of the ultra-rich.
What ties both these threads together is, of course, not only a commonality of threat, but that the overwhelming majority of the ultra-rich were nominally Christian. I say "nominally", since the merest look at how they treated their workers and the public shows it to be Sunday-deep.
The two combine quite easily. To use the well-known line from the song "Preacher and the Slave", by Joe Hill, "you'll get pie in the sky when you die". Keep the overwhelming majority of the populace down with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), and promises of the future, or vaporware, as we say in the computer industry, while you keep your money and power in the here-and-now.
Putting all of this together, we realize that anti-Communism was a religious as well as an economic campaign. Just as the new War Against Terror, with Dubya's threat to perform preemptive strikes on up to 60 countries, is surely a reprise of the same. Remember, it was Bush, Sr., who, during the campaign of 1992, made the off-the-cuff remark that he "didn't think you could be a good American if you weren't a good Christian". This is a war against yet another group of secular millenarianists, whose major support comes from people in the same desperate poverty that our ancestors were, a century ago, and whose governments, under the rubric of "free market equals democracy", keep them where they are.
Is this the path which we, as a nation, wish to pursue? It's certainly not the America that I believe most of us want.